Those soda bottle photos are in a completely flat area, and those black rings are actually a graphic printed behind the flat plastic cover (you can see it best if you look at the top-left bottle, and how the reflections go straight across it). But they look so inviting and 3D! That’s where the guy pushed, right on the (apparent) big button with the picture of the soda he wanted. The technical term is a false cognitive affordance, something that visually looked like it afforded pushing but really didn’t. He may also have been affected by prior experience and expectations – there are lots of other soda machines that have large buttons with pictures of the soda bottles on them.

Where should you actually push? Those tiny little silver buttons below. I can understand the original concept of the machine – you can print anything you want and change the graphics easily without the limitations of printouts that fit inside giant plastic buttons, but that freedom of design also allowed some poor graphic designer to create a really bad design. But an interesting design problem to think about while waiting for my car to be ready!

First problem – when we got inside the elevator, I accidentally pressed the number instead of the button. I’d had no problem with the buttons outside the elevator, and these were almost the same, why make a mistake now? In the elevator lobby, the button labels were on the buttons themselves, and there was nothing else to press; it’d be hard to make a mistake with those. But inside, the button labels were (1) separate and round, just like the buttons, and (2) a higher contrast with the background panel, and so caught my eye. A great example of the effect of context on usage.

Second problem – I almost pressed the floor for 18 instead of 19. That’s easy to do, the labels are closer to the button to the left than to the button on the right that they label.

Third problem – the next day when we got back into the elevators, my colleague pressed 22 for his floor and then I pressed 18 for mine instead of 23 and 19. Then we both realized our mistake – this new elevator looked almost identical to the one we’d had yesterday, but all of the buttons were off by one because this elevator went to the 9th floor but the other one didn’t. What amazed me was that it took just one day to form a visual/spatial memory of the location of the button for the floor, and that this happened to both me and my colleague. We had a hard time believing that they would really move the buttons from one elevator to the next, so I had to take these photos to prove it.

Thanks, elevator designers, for this interesting little example of bad design!

If you love a good error message or software with a sense of humor like I do, check out some of my previous posts

• You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.
• Lulspeek 4 awsum error message
• E is for Excellent Error Message!
• The zombies think they have brains

The screen on my iPad is gorgeous and I love reading magazines and newspapers on it, but for reading books in bed I go back to my iPhone because it’s light enough to hold in one hand. That’s a big selling point for most dedicated eBook readers, weight. The iPad weighs 24 ounces (1.5 lbs), but the new Kindle weighs just 8.5 ounces, and the Sony weighs just under 9. But I dunno, maybe this guy likes getting a forearm workout while he reads.

The page where you fill out the shipping details has many boxes (10, to be exact), and one of them lets you pick the ship date to print on the shipping label, like this:

There’s another box in the next column that lets you schedule a pickup, like this:

Here’s my assessment of the task and design elements that contributed to my problem.

1. The first box let me choose a date, so in my mind I had already chosen the date I wanted the package to get shipped, check that checkbox in my mind and I didn’t think about it again.
2. The second box has an alert telling me that I can’t schedule pickup service today, but this alert is not next to the date selection box. My eyes skipped all that text and went straight to the pickup times.
3. The alert was purple in an area of black text, and the circle is a similar design element used for the calendar menu – blends right into the page.
4. The second box chose a pickup date for me that was different from my ship date. Because it picked the date automatically, I never reviewed it at all, and it guessed wrong about the day I would want a pickup. Automation is no help if it gets it wrong.
5. The dates are all numbers. Numbers are easy to scan over and miss, and half the time I don’t even know today’s date, so even with the number I could look at it and still not realize that August 16th isn’t today. Both the pickup date here and the date in my confirmation email should list both the numbers and text like Monday, to help prevent me from making a mistake.
6. If the system had been really smart, I think it might have noticed that my pickup date is different from my ship date and asked me if I really meant to do that. I haven’t studied shipping habits, perhaps lots of people do this and they would all get annoyed if there were a confirmation every time they picked a different pickup date from the ship date, but I’m not them and I’m annoyed that it didn’t help me notice this.
7. I think FedEx and I have a different ideas about what “Ship date” means. To me it means the day that the package gets into FedEx’s hands, but that can’t be what it means to them because then they wouldn’t let me set a ship date that’s earlier than my pickup date.

A lot issues here, many of them subtle and difficult to predict or possibly even observe in a usability test session. So while I can’t thank FedEx for picking up my package, I will thank them for an interesting design puzzle to untangle, and an excuse for telling myself that it’s not my fault my package didn’t go out today.

• Humans are best at (HABA) information retrieval using context and associations, machines are best at (MABA) information retrieval based on long lists and structured information.
• Humans are best at creative and adaptive tasks, machines are best at precise and repetitive tasks.

The lists change as machine capabilities change, but they are helpful when assessing a complex system and looking for places where machine automation can help, such as scanning barcodes at the grocery store instead of typing in prices, and where they introduce new problems, such as airplane pilots having difficulty staying awake during long flights because so many tasks have been automated. So how does this apply to my toothbrush?

The toothbrush takes care of the aspects of brushing my teeth that a machine is best at.

• It vibrates the head of the toothbrush, moving the bristles across my teeth much faster than I could ever hope to do (machines are better at small, repetitive motions).
• It automatically stops after the ADA-recommended 2 minutes, so I keep brushing until it stops (machines are better at judging time).
• It has a special beep (really a brief change in the vibrating speed) every 30 seconds that lets me know when to switch quadrants, so that I don’t over- or under-brush different areas (again with the time).
• It even has a quick 1- minute mode for days when I’m in a rush to make sure I get at least some minimal brushing in, since humans are even worse at judging time when they’re stressed (machines don’t get stressed about being late).

That leaves me, the human, to focus on the things that I’m better at, like slowly moving the toothbrush and getting that brush head into the back corners of my mouth. I get better brushing coverage, since I’m not distracted by trying to also keep up the repetitive brushing motions (humans aren’t very good at doing multiple things at once).

Cleaner teeth and a quick lesson in function allocation. I love it!

Proximity: page controls are lower and so closer to the page itself.

Error prevention: how many times have you stopped your music because you accidentally used your music tab to browse to a new web page? Now your Pandora tab can turn off the navigation bar to prevent this mistake.

Simplicity: the “navigation toolbar” is simpler because it contains only navigation functions. Browser tabs that don’t need the navigation toolbar can simplify the interface by turning it off.

Context: Web pages can add a toolbar at the top of the page, under the tabs, that makes it easier to access page functions. Since this toolbar is under the tab, it only shows when that tab is selected.

Grouping: the screenshots below illustrate how the current design has page functions (blue) mixed together with navigating to a new page (green) and application functions (yellow), but the new design has a cleaner organization and separation of these features.

There are some problems with consumer products that you don’t discover until people start using them. For example, I bought my iPad in April, but it wasn’t until June when I started wearing shorts that I realized that the metal back is really cold! However, this is a problem that the mobile phone industry has known about for years. It was one of the factors in moving from external to internal antennas; users like to rest a finger on the antenna while making calls, which greatly interferes with reception. It’s because skin is slightly conductive, which is exactly why Apple can use a capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone (instead of a resistive touchscreen, which requires pressure), and why you can’t use your iPhone with gloves on.

Using this external antenna was a carefully deliberated decision by Apple to achieve a particular look and shape. As a consulting company that works in product design, we are very aware that there are tradeoffs to be made between usability and design. In our own design process, we try to carefully balance aesthetics, fun, ease of use, and efficiency. You take into account how the product looks, how people react to it, how they use it, how many people will experience anticipated difficulties, and how severe these difficulties are. Not wanting to put a cold iPad on my lap? Not a big problem. Dropping a call because I’m holding my phone wrong? Huge! Apple is known for pursing elegant designs, which is why the front of the iPhone only has one button and their mice have none, but design should never come at the expense of basic functionality.

According to engadget, Apple’s suggestion is to hold the phone a different way. That’s ridiculous! It goes against one of our mottos in Human Factors and Usability, “fit the task to the person, not the person to the task.”  Or you can buy a case. This is why Apple has for the first time released their own iPhone cases, called bumpers, which insulate the band from your hand. I hear they’re selling like hotcakes. But I’ve never put a case on my iPod Touch, it’s too beautiful and thin, and certainly don’t want to cover up my lovely new iPhone. So now I have to choose between a phone with stunningly beautiful industrial design, or a phone hidden inside a case that can actually make calls. Completely ridiculous!

I’m sure that in a few weeks there will be dozens of companies offering their own cases and solutions, and hopefully some of them will be more elegant than the plastic bumpers from Apple. But shame on you, Apple, for giving design a bad name by creating a phone that forces you to choose between aesthetics and functionality! No one should have to make that choice.